


Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure category. Nutanix appears to have the upper hand with its advanced features and robust support, which is reflected in its generally higher price and perceived ROI.
Features: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is known for its all-in-one capabilities, ease of use, high availability, and rich enterprise functionalities like one-click upgrades and strong cloud integration. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers simple management, high availability, and eliminates the need for separate SANs, providing significant flexibility and redundancy.
Room for Improvement: NCI users suggest enhancements in network integration, support for non-AHV hypervisors, and more transparency in pricing. Security features and software-defined networking capabilities are also areas for improvement. In contrast, StarWind users point to the need for improved documentation, a more comprehensive GUI, and reliance on Windows in certain configurations being a drawback.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is praised for its flexible deployment across on-premises and hybrid cloud setups, along with highly rated customer service. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is noted for its straightforward on-premises deployment and proactive support, although minor language barriers have been reported by some users.
Pricing and ROI: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure typically commands a higher price due to its advanced features, with users noting worthwhile investment through efficiency gains and reduced operational expenses. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers a cost-effective solution, especially beneficial for small to medium businesses, with transparency in pricing and significant ROI through reduced infrastructure costs and ease of management.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
Their technical support has been perfect lately, so I would give it a 10.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
When we send an email, an engineer is assigned within 15 to 20 minutes, and we get on a call to resolve the issue.
The second one was a licensing issue because when I switched from the SMB package to another package, I had to change the way of licensing, and that was horrendous.
There are between 5 and 10,000 people using it in our organization.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
The scalability of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) deserves an eight out of ten rating, as there is no solution that is 100% efficient and there is always room for improvement.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
Compared to VM, we find it most stable.
Regarding stability, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) a seven out of ten.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
One way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade.
It could be interesting to offer back another small business pricing that would be more suitable for small companies.
They should add AI features in the future.
I would suggest that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) should develop their own P2V (physical to VM) tools instead of requiring users to rely on third-party solutions.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making it good for us.
At first, it is cheaper than cloud services, so the cost is a major benefit.
It costs more compared to VMware due to different licensing areas.
The pricing is renewed every year, at almost $100,000 per year.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade's scalability is one of the most valuable features, and importantly, it always works, allowing for seamless upgrades.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
When technology development or devops teams request server provisioning, the setup time has been reduced from hours to less than 20 minutes.
The performance was really better for applications and access times to the data.
The replication method between Nutanix clusters is a valuable feature.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) | 5.7% |
| Pure Storage FlashBlade | 3.3% |
| StarWind HyperConverged Appliance | 2.2% |
| Other | 88.8% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
| Large Enterprise | 21 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 92 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 77 |
| Large Enterprise | 82 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 50 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 22 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure delivers high performance and scalability with central management and one-click upgrades. It enhances data protection and reduces deployment complexities, perfect for businesses seeking efficient virtualization.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a comprehensive platform integrating compute, storage, and network for optimal infrastructure management. It supports multiple hypervisors, offering flexibility, efficiency, and ease of use. With features like Prism for centralized management, organizations can manage resources effectively while benefiting from data protection enhancements such as deduplication and compression. Hyper-convergence enables seamless integration, reducing operational costs and increasing scalability. Though the pricing is high, and setup and administration can be complex, the ability to support hybrid cloud implementations and critical infrastructures like VDI and databases provides notable advantages.
What are the key features of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure?Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure finds adoption across industries for virtualization, cloud services, and infrastructure consolidation. Organizations utilize it for hybrid clouds and virtual server hosting, supporting applications like databases and virtual desktop infrastructures. They report enhanced data protection, disaster recovery capabilities, and improved performance, facilitating effective resource management.
For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.
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